Psalm 107, and we'll read the rest of the psalm together, beginning at verse 23. Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the Lord, His wondrous works in the deep. For He commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their evil plight. They reeled and staggered like drunken men and were at their wits' end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress. He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad that the waters were quiet, and He brought them to their desired haven. Let them thank the Lord for His steadfast love, for His wondrous works to the children of man. Let them extol Him in the congregation of the people and praise Him in the assembly of the elders. He turns rivers into a desert, and springs of water into thirsty ground, a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the evil of its inhabitants. He turns a desert into pools of water, and a parched land into springs of water. And there He lets the hungry dwell, and they establish a city to dwell in. They sow fields and plant vineyards and get a fruitful yield. By His blessing they multiply greatly, and He does not let their livestock diminish. When they are diminished and brought low through oppression, evil, and sorrow, He pours contempt on princes and makes them wander in trackless wastes, but He raises up the needy out of affliction and makes their families like flocks. The upright see it and are glad, and all wickedness shuts its mouth. Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things, let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we pray that as we consider this psalm, Your words which You have spoken to us, that You would come and help us by Your Spirit to be wise and to consider these sayings, to think upon Your steadfast love, and to be filled with thankfulness to You. Help us, Lord, for we are a needy people. We are weak. We need You to open our eyes. We need You to enable us to see the truth of our situation and of Your goodness. We pray that You'd help us in Christ's name. Amen. Well, it's the last Sunday of 2025. Another year done. They go quicker and quicker, don't they? And I don't know what your year has been like. I don't know the highs and the lows or the pains or the joys, but I do know with certainty that you've experienced troubles this past year. Would that be right? Anyone who hasn't experienced troubles? I'd be very surprised. Because Job tells us in, well actually it's his friend, but in Job 5:7 he says, "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." And they always fly upward. No one escapes wilderness experiences, no one escapes dark nights, foolish decisions, and stormy seas. And I do not know what next year will hold for you. Perhaps you have great hope coming into this new year, new jobs, a new child perhaps, maybe a wedding. Or perhaps you're not sure what 2026 will show for you either, but I can guarantee you that you'll face some troubles. And so Psalm 107 is helpful for us because it enables us and helps us to look back on a year that's passed and look forward to a year that's coming and ground us in what our response should be to troubles and how our God likes to work through troubles. This is a very poetic psalm. It has a very clear structure to it. Verses 1 to 3 introduces the psalm where the psalmist calls us to give thanks to the Lord for His goodness and specifically for His steadfast love that endures forever in verse 1. But this psalm is not calling everyone to thank the Lord, only some people. In verse 2, he tells us who he's thinking of, "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom He has redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands." And as we look at this psalm together in the following sort of four verses of the psalm, I want you to realize that all of us face the troubles that this psalm describes, but only some of us respond in such a way that makes us the redeemed, who the Lord has delivered out of trouble. Troubles are common to life; redemption is not. And I want you to ask yourself, as we look at these troubles, who are you? Are you the person who experiences these troubles and is not redeemed, who doesn't know what to do? Or are you one of those who has experienced these troubles, and will experience these troubles, and you know what it is to be redeemed through the troubles? You know what to do when you face these troubles. Because the redeemed people that the psalmist is speaking to, notice the tense in verse 2 and 3, they have experienced redemption before. They know what it is to be saved from trouble and gathered in to be one of the Lord's people. Now, in this poem, the next 28 verses give us four pictures, four images of what the redeemed people have been delivered from, the sorts of troubles that we will experience in life, and how God likes to act through them. I want to take you through these images, these pictures, and as we consider them together, I want you to think back on the year that's passed or even the life that you've had, and think about, have you ever known what it is to be in these situations? Have you ever known what it is to be redeemed through this situations? Or maybe are you in this situation right now? The first scene is there in verse 4 and 5. Here we are wandering in a vast desert: sand and rocks are everywhere. As far as your eye can see, there is only hot and dry emptiness. As you march day after day through this desert, your eyes strain for signs of civilization, for buildings, for some people. The desert feels too exposed, too risky, too uncertain. A city would be a welcome place of refuge, company, and security. But this desert is not just devoid of life and company and safety, it's devoid of food and water as well. Each day you wake up hungry and thirsty. Each day you trudge mile after mile through the waste, and each night you stare up at the sky to distract your empty belly and parched lips. This picture describes seasons of life: times of uncertainty, perhaps the loss of a job, financial instability, loneliness, a lack of a place to call home, maybe a yearning for a spouse or a longing for a child, a disconnectedness from family and friends. You know those moments when you wake up and each day just feels the same and there's no place, there's no food, an inability to see where God is leading you or even to see that God is there at all. All of these experiences can be described as wilderness experiences, wanderings, wastelands. And we can experience these things physically, like I've just mentioned. These sorts of things are just a physical aspect of life where we feel like we're in a wilderness. But they can be experienced spiritually too. Our physical desires and wilderness struggles point us to our deeper spiritual struggles. We were made to live with God together with Him in His city with His people. And our souls hunger and thirst after connection with God and with His people. We're made to love and walk with Him. It's as basic a need as food and drink is. And yet at times, we feel far from God. His presence, though He never is truly absent, feels like it's gone. We find no satisfaction in prayer, no delight in His word. Even coming to church week after week can just feel dry and mundane. It all just feels like more sand and dust. Have you ever experienced that? Importantly, in this scene, the wilderness can come upon us not because of our sin. You notice this is just described as a situation. There's no reference to sin here. Like Israel's hunger and thirst after they crossed the Red Sea and before they came to Sinai, they hadn't sinned yet, but God makes them hungry, God makes them thirsty, and it's only after they experience that hunger and thirst that they then start to grumble and sin against God, right? But He leads them into the wilderness before they've sinned. And just like that, sometimes God leads us into times of wilderness wanderings for His own purposes, because this is a fallen world. I wonder if your soul has experienced the wilderness last year. The next scene in our psalm is in verse 10 to 12, and it's a dark prison cell. And this scene comes about because of your sin. See there in verse 11? They sit in darkness, prisoners in affliction and in irons, because they had rebelled against the words of God and spurned the counsel of the Most High. Here we have chains holding us down, darkness. There's no light in this prison. It feels close to death. It's lonely. We feel abandoned with none to help there in verse 12. But this isn't the sort of cell you get sent to to rot in solitude. This is a prison of forced labor. Each day we awake to hard work, doing the same old thing with no reward for our labor. This is a prisoner-of-war camp. It's the Soviet gulag. This is Israel in Egypt slaving away for a tyrant king with no hope of escape except for death. And once again, this picture describes physical times in our life, things we experience physically and emotionally, trapped in terrible circumstances because of evil, sinful decisions that we've made. This is the tyranny of a foolish marriage, the prison cell of addictions to alcohol, drugs, porn, or even the ubiquitous addiction to dopamine resulting in our endless doom-scrolling. It's a prison, right? This is feeling trapped in a financial mess of your own causing due to selfish, needless, compulsive shopping. No light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the lust and greed driving ceaseless purchases. And here we see the closer relationship between this image of life and the physical aspects of this struggle and the slavery of sin itself because sin is a slave master. It grabs hold of us. It ties us down. It robs us of light and joy and compels us to work ever harder seeking a satisfaction we know we will never receive. It keeps promising but increasingly fails to deliver. Small sins, big sins, they all are a dark prison cell. Charles Wesley knew of this truth. He wrote of it in his great hymn "And Can It Be" when he says, "Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night." You hear it? Dark prison cell. Does that describe any aspect of your life over the last year? Stop and think back. Are there any of the sins that have got you trapped? You can't seem to escape. Is there a physical part of your life that has been brought about because of your own sin that you just can't be free from? The next picture is in verse 17 and 18. And this one is a picture of sick fools. Once again, the driving force behind this disaster is sin, but this sin doesn't lead to a dark prison camp, it leads to sickness. A sickness so bad that it destroys your appetite. Things that used to delight you and satisfy you for a moment now hold no joy whatsoever. You feel like you're wasting away. This is not a wilderness where there is no food and water to be seen. This is a place where food and water are plentiful, but they've lost their appeal. This is not a passing sickness, it's a sickness that leads to death. You see it there, they loathe any kind of food, they draw near to the gates of death. And we know it's a sickness because in verse 20 the Lord has to come and heal them. Can you see the frail man lying in a hospital bed, thin and gaunt, wasting away with the hospital food right in front of him? That's the picture. This is a vivid physical picture that we should all recognize in its actual physical form. Chronic illness that sucks the delight from life. Battles with fear or depression that you just can't shake, a constant, relentless, joy-destroying force. Physical sickness that keeps recurring like cancer. I wonder if you've suffered with any of those this year, felt those troubles and trials. But this picture also speaks directly to the effects of sin. Sin not only enslaves us in a prison of darkness, it destroys our appetite for the very thing it promised. The liar tries to weave the right stories so that others will like him, but in doing so, he destroys his very ability to have genuine relationship. It's fascinating. The thief steals to satisfy his desire for more things, but it robs him of the satisfaction of earning his possessions through honest, hard work. And so the poor honest man takes more delight in his meager possessions than the dishonest thief does in his riches. The wellsprings of sin are broken and the waters fail. You see how it works? Sin is the great destroyer, robbing us of the ability to enjoy the very delights it tries to sell, causing us to become sick, wasting away. Our last scene is as vivid as the others in verse 23 to 27. Here we see a cargo ship sailing off into the sea, just going about its business. But God causes a wind to rise, the swell starts to get choppy, the ship begins to roll up and down the waves, tossed from one direction to another. Even the experienced sailors are shocked there in verse 17, sorry, 27 and 26. They don't know what to do. They stagger about the ship and are completely unsure as to how this will end. This is the storm of Jonah. This is the wind and waves threatening to flood the disciples' boat on the Sea of Galilee. I'm sure many of us have had stormy moments this year, times when our plans turn to nothing, times when strange things knock us about, things we couldn't see coming and never would have expected. A breakdown in a relationship that has us confused, a job loss that came out of nowhere, a struggle with our kids that doesn't seem to have an easy answer. But spiritual storms come as well. These inward storms cause our souls to stagger and lurch, afflicted with doubts one moment, cold indifference the next, only to fall back as dark despair floods in again. Truths that once seemed so stable and solid while the seas were flat now seem uncertain and our heart and mind struggles to engage with the things we once loved. Have you ever experienced those storms of life and spiritual storms of your soul? And so we have these four scenes laid out before us, scenes that are not mutually exclusive but can be experienced all at the same time. These are images of life. They're pictures of troubles that afflict us all. It's one of the things I love about the Bible. God is so good at describing life. And He doesn't pull his punches. He just tells it like it is. Who hasn't felt like they're wandering in a wilderness or trapped in a dark prison or sick because of their own foolishness or tossed on a stormy sea? Physically, emotionally, spiritually, this is what happens in life. What sets the redeemed people who thank the Lord in this troublesome life apart from those who are not thanking the Lord is not that the redeemed people don't experience difficulties like this. That's not the difference. Everyone experiences these difficulties. The redeemed people respond in a particular way. Look at the repeated line in each of these four verses of our poem. Verse 6, verse 13, verse 19, and verse 28 are all identical. This is how redeemed people respond to the troubles of life: "Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress." "Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress." That refrain, that chorus is the core of the Christian life, and in it is found the simplicity of the gospel. It's an amazing verse. If you recognize yourself in one or several of these scenes and you want to escape, this is the only way out. Cry out to the Lord in your trouble, and He will deliver you from your distress. Are you lost in the wilderness, struggling to find satisfaction for your thirsty soul? Cry out to the Lord in your trouble, and He will deliver you from your distress. Are you enslaved in a dark prison by your addiction to your sin? Cry out to the Lord in your trouble, and He will deliver you from your distress. Are you sick and wasting away, losing your desire for the very thing you're chasing after? What do you do? Cry out to the Lord in your trouble, and He will deliver you from your distress. Are you tossed to and fro by the stormy waves of life, unable to find your sea legs? Cry out to the Lord in your trouble, and He will deliver you from your distress. And you say, "Yes, Tom, I get it," and I say, "Yes, the psalmist wants us to get it." I know this is true because of the tense in this poem. This psalm is about things that have already happened to the redeemed people of God. Because the tense is not the tense that I was saying it in. The tense is past tense. They cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress. It's all past tense. This has happened already to the people of God. This psalm is looking back on life, saying, "I've been in these scenarios. I've been through this difficulty." The people of God have been in these scenarios. Each of these you can point to areas of history in the Israelite timeline, in their past. But each individual redeemed person can point back at things in their life where they've been in these situations and God has delivered them from their distress. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, it's all true. And every Christian in this room would testify to the fact that they have experienced this. They've been brought by these scenarios to the end of themselves, and they've cried out to the Lord in their trouble, and He has delivered them from their distress. And one of the beautiful things about this psalm is that it highlights for us that there is no trouble that the Lord is unwilling to redeem us from. You could be in trouble through no fault of your own, thinking, "Well, this is just fate, right? God's put me here. I didn't put myself here, so I've just got to cave in." And God says, "No. Yes, I've brought you into the wilderness, but I brought you here so that you would cry out to me in your trouble, so that I would deliver you from your distress." You could be in a situation that you brought yourself into. You could have been a fool, sold over to your sin and got yourself into your own mess. And you could sit there and think, "Well, I'm just suffering the consequences of my own sin. I'm the idiot who got me here. Surely God's going to look at me and say, 'Well, you can get yourself out too.'" But no. It's incredible. The dark prison that you put yourself in, God says, "When you're there, cry out to Me in your trouble, and I will deliver you from your distress." The sickbed where you have been sapped of the joys of life because of your own foolishness, God says, "Cry out to me there, and I will deliver you from your distress." It's amazing. The Lord loves to deliver those who cry out to Him. That's the only thing that sets apart the redeemed here from the unredeemed, from those who are in those troubles and trials and have no way out. The only thing that separates them is that the redeemed cry out to God. And so if you have struggled through these scenes in your life this year and are still in the middle of one of these pictures, you know what to do. Cry out to the Lord. And in each of these scenes in this psalm, the verses following this refrain describe how God reverses their situation. In verse 7 to 9, the wilderness wanderers who don't have a city and are hungry and thirsty are led by a straight way 'til they reach a city to dwell in. And they thank the Lord and find that He satisfies their longing souls and fills their hungry souls with good things. In verses 14 to 16, those who are sitting in the dark prison are brought out into the light and have their chains burst apart. They're liberated from their prison and given freedom once more. And in response, they also thank the Lord for His deliverance. In verse 20 to 22, those who are sick because of their own sinful foolishness are healed by the word of God, delivered from their own destruction, and so they rejoice and sing praises to the Lord. And in verses 29 to 32, those who sailed on stormy seas find that the sea becomes calm and they're brought to a quiet haven, a place of rest and safety. And so they also thank the Lord and sing of His deliverance. This is what God does. He reverses terrible circumstances and turns them into a place of peace and goodness. Why? Because of His steadfast love and because He is good. This reversal, this pattern of God's ways of working is the psalmist's point in the kind of conclusion verse stanza in verse 33 through to 42. These verses are all about how God can take good situations like rivers and springs of water and turn them into disasters, deserts, and thirsty lands, and how he can take disastrous situations like deserts and thirsty lands and turn them into pools of water and springs of life. And the point of this is that those who do not sense their need of God, well, He takes their good scenarios, their good situations, and He reverses them into judgment. But those who do sense their need of God—the hungry, the thirsty, the needy, the desperate—for them, He turns deserts into pools. He establishes cities in the wilderness. He blesses them. Look at this in verse 37 and 38. He gives them a fruitful yield and blesses them and multiplies them greatly. As Genesis 1:28 language. He takes the wilderness of sin, the prison, and turns it into the garden of Eden. Often, God does this in physical ways in our life. Those who are longing for a city, longing for a place to belong, are given a spouse or a child or a friend. Those who are trapped in addiction are freed from their slavery to drugs or alcohol or porn. Those who are sick are at times made well. And those whose life has become a stormy sea sometimes find circumstances settling down. But God doesn't always resolve the physical issues that are described in these verses. Sometimes the sickness or storm never fully goes away. But the Lord does always resolve the spiritual conditions described in this psalm and will eventually resolve all things. This was the whole point of the Lord God sending Jesus. He is actually the answer to every single one of the difficulties in this psalm. Notice the parallels between this psalm and the troubles described here and the New Testament's way of describing Jesus. Those who wander in the wilderness are looking for a city, well Jesus builds the eternal city of God. He's gathering a people and building a city which we see today in a small way in gatherings of believers in churches, but will see fully in the new heavens and the new earth in the great city of God. He is the straight way to the city of God. All those who repent and believe in Him are brought into His kingdom and receive brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers in this life, Jesus says, and eternal life in the kingdom to come. Jesus is the bread of life who satisfies those who hunger and thirst. He's the water of life who becomes a wellspring bubbling up out of your soul. He did this physically while He walked the earth, feeding 5,000 and 4,000 with nothing but a few loaves of bread and fish. And He still has the power to provide in that way today, but He does this spiritually even more so. He is ultimately the bread that our soul hungers for and the water that our heart thirsts after. Jesus is the one who came to set captives free. He did this in His life. He freed the demon-possessed. He liberated those who were blindly bound in their sin, like Saul, who went from relentlessly killing Christians to preaching the gospel to everyone he met. Jesus broke the power of sin as He suffered on the cross so that His people cannot be endlessly bound in the chains of sin and darkness anymore. All those who come to Him will be set free and are set free. He is the one who came to heal our diseases, the diseases caused by the foolishness of our sin. He healed physical diseases while He was here on earth, and He still does so today when He chooses, but He always heals the sickness of our heart, reviving our souls, enabling us to taste with renewed appetites the good gifts that God gives and receive them with thankfulness, the only way they are to be received. Those who know Christ are able to look out on this world and enjoy it and see even behind a frowning providence God's smile. The hymn writer put it well in "Loved with Everlasting Love." I'm contrasting this right to the to the sick, the foolishly sick, who loathe their food, who can't satisfy their appetites for the good things of this world. Well the hymn writer says, "Heaven above is deeper blue, earth around is sweeter green; Something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen. Birds with gladder songs o'erflow, flowers with deeper beauties shine, Since I know, as now I know, that I am His, and He is mine." You see, when Christ comes, we find our satisfaction in Him and He enables us to have the appetite for this life, to enjoy it. Jesus is also the one who stills the stormy sea. He did this once again in His life for real with His disciples as they lived out this scene on the Sea of Galilee, and He still calms physical storms today. But He also enables His people to have inner peace, inner calm, a peace that surpasses understanding. He enables His people to know and believe with all their heart the great promises of God which gives them stability and strength in the storm. Perhaps you're listening to this and thinking, "Look, I know that Jesus is all these things, but I still find myself wandering about in the wilderness. I still find myself bound in my sin and sick and tossed on the stormy sea." Perhaps you listen to this and feel down, thinking that your sinful unbelief in Christ as the satisfaction and the resolution for all these things is what's causing the trouble in your life. So how can God save you in that instance, right? Well, I just want to remind you, again, that this psalm presupposes that our sin is sometimes the thing directly placing us in these troubles. And still the Lord loves to hear His people cry out and loves to deliver them. It's good. And the reason for this, I believe, is because the goal of these situations, the reason that God puts us in these circumstances, is because He wants us to cry out to Him and cast our hope on Him. Each one of these scenarios, both physically, emotionally, spiritually, however you're encountering it, is designed specifically to bring us to an end of ourselves. As John Newton writes, these are words he puts in the mouth of God, he says, "These inward trials I employ, from self and pride to set you free, and break your schemes of earthly joy that you would seek your all in me." You see the point? God, why are You leading me into the wilderness? Why are You bringing me into the prison? Why are you allowing me to enslave myself to my sin? Why are you causing me to lie sick on the deathbed? Why are you bringing about the stormy sea? "I employ these things," God says, "to set you free from yourself, from your pride, and to stop you from seeking your joy in the things of this earth, to drive you to your knees so that you would seek after God and God alone." The wilderness is there so that I would feel my lack and my inability to satisfy my longings so that I would cry out to the Lord and seek the one who can provide a city and satisfy my hungry soul. The dark prison is there so that I can see the horror and slavery of sin and know my own inability to free myself. For only then will I cry out to the Lord and He will deliver me. The awful sickness is there so that I would recognize the deceptive nature of sin and my own need of health and righteous vigor. For only then will I cry out to the Lord, the great physician who alone can heal me. The stormy seas are there to release my hold on the security of stability. Only when I know that life is insecure, only when I see that my job, my relationships, even my mental state is so easily changed, will I give up on trusting on those things and hoping in those things and finding my security in those things, seeking to stand on them as if they can hold my weight. They turn out to be as easily changed as the deck of a ship. When I see this, the stormy seas will drive me to seek the rock that cannot be moved but stands firm despite the changes that come in life. Life is characterized by difficulty. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. But those who've been redeemed by the Lord know that difficulty and trouble is not the end of the story. It's only the beginning of these stanzas. And they know the right response to difficulty and trouble: Cry out to the Lord and He will deliver you. That's the end of the story. He takes our difficulties and our troubles and He reverses them when we cry out to Him, and He will reverse them. Verse 43 of our psalm tells us, "Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things. Let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord." Take some time today to consider how the Lord has delivered you in this last year. Consider how He is willing to deliver you even now. Consider how He may bring troubles into your life so that you can cry out to Him once more. Consider redeemed how you cried out to the Lord at the first and found deliverance from all your troubles. Live out this pattern. This pattern is the Christian life. Experience trouble, cry out to the Lord in your trouble, find deliverance, and then thank and praise Him for His steadfast love, as the psalmist calls us to do. "Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, and His steadfast love endures forever." Let's pray.